


Undyne takes you back to her old house

by morefishplease



Series: Comfy Fish Stories [12]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Home, Sad, The Underground (Undertale)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-16 14:55:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10573596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morefishplease/pseuds/morefishplease
Summary: What it says in the title. Due to having originally been written and posted for a different site most of my stories' titles are just descriptions of the story, and I'm too lazy to make up meaningful titles for everything.





	

“So this is where you grew up?” you ask her, and Undyne nods brightly, teeth flashing as she grins at you. She’s in a good mood today; she’s dragged you all over the underground, showing you all the places she hung out when she was a kid. A few people had given you strange glances but they generally seemed to follow the rule that if Undyne was cool with you they were cool with you. She drew a gaggle of monster kids after her as she pulled you along by the hand; she didn’t notice, she was too absorbed in her trip down memory lane, but you noticed them. They all looked strange, but you suppose you looked just as strange to them, too. They hid in the tall waving grass and peered out cautiously, eyes fixed on Undyne. When you looked back at them they would scatter, leaving furrows in the grass as they went.

Back to the house. It’s cool, kind of, but it looks like there was a fire at some point that nobody bothered to put out. It used to be shaped like a fish, but part of the roof and one of the walls had fallen in. Undyne picks her way over the fence and into the house, and you follow cautiously.

“What happened?” you ask, and she shrugs, forcing nonchalance into her voice.

“It was my fault, actually. I didn’t always use to be such a good cook.”

You start to say that good cooks can usually make more than just spaghetti, but you stop yourself just in time.

“I’m sorry,” you tell her.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I was younger and I didn’t really care. I used to be pretty wild, but I calmed down a lot when I met you.” She glances back, smiles at you. “Now it’s just memories.”

You lean in, kiss her. You can feel her smiling against your lips until all you’re kissing is teeth. She raises her hand, strokes your cheek with uncharacteristic gentleness. Her scaly hand is warm against your skin and the feeling is nice; you run a hand through her hair and she makes a tiny noise in your mouth, then breaks out in a fit of giggles. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m ridiculous, I get so into it. I ruined the moment.”

“I don’t think you ruined it,” you say, slipping your arms around her waist and following her into the burnt-out wreck of her childhood home.

The inside fared better than the outside, oddly enough. You ask Undyne about it and she shrugs, tells you that they make things sturdier here. “The fire was mostly in the kitchen,” she points, “so the rest is in better shape.”

“Nobody cleaned this up?”

“I don’t know if you noticed,” she says, “but there aren’t that many people around any more. Nobody cared enough to, I expect.”

Undyne has gotten very quiet. She’s standing before a closed door, smudged with soot but still whole. She’s got one hand in her pocket, fist closed around something. She’s looking down at the knob and the way the angles of her face catch the dusty half-light within the house makes you wish you were a photographer or an artist or something, something that could record this single spectral moment in a medium more tangible than just your brain. Even as you stare at her there is the incremental slipping knowledge that it is already passing away from you, further and further into the past. Only your thoughts are quick enough to flick through all these eventualities as the moment simultaneously lingers and you cannot move nor speak or act, just watch.

Undyne is standing at an angle to you; you can see her muscles and the outlines they make against her clothes. Even under her leather jacket she is muscular, you can tell; it’s the way the arms bulge out, thin and strong. The lines of her neck are corded and bulldoggish, her legs are thick as trunks, her core tapers and tapers but still bears enough beautiful, blessed muscle to crush you if she holds you too hard in bed. Sometimes you have to wake her up in the middle of the night and gently disentangle her arms from around you while she mumbles, sleepy and confused, and then kiss her back to sleep before she can get worried. Though you would never tell her it is in these few, scant moments when the stars seem to align that you love Undyne the most.

The moment slides past like gelatin and she pulls her hand out of her pocket, looks back at you. She sees the expression on your face. “What?” she asks. You shake your head, tell her it’s nothing. Even if you explained it she wouldn’t understand. She views her body as a tool; she’s self-conscious of it around you, you can tell. How she holds herself, how she’s always careful not to hurt you. She must spend so much time worrying about what she can and can’t do when you’re there.

“This used to be our room, mine and my parents” she tells you, nodding at the door. “Then just mine, when they died.” You don’t know what to say so you reach out, take Undyne’s hand. She looks down at yours, smiles softly. She hasn’t told you anything about her childhood and you’d never asked. She opens her hand and reveals what she took from her pocket; a key, old-fashioned, brassy. She stares at it for a moment and you feel in the tense of her arm that she’s about to change her mind.

“We could do it together,” you suggest, and knit your fingers with hers. The key is cold and oily to the touch. She looks up at you, starts to say something, stops. A big breath, those bellows-lungs gust in and out and she nods. The two of you raise your hands, press the key into the door’s lock, turn. The lock clicks and the door swings open.

The fire has not touched this room at all; it smells like Undyne still, slightly musty with the time it’s spent vacant. There are anime posters on the walls, a painting of a lion hung across from the bed. Clothes are still hanging in the closet, books are still folded open on the floor. Undyne looks around, sits down on the bed raising a cloud of dust, rests her head in her hands glumly.

When you sit down next to her she hugs you tightly and it is only then that you realize she has started to cry. “I thought this would be easier,” she tells you. “I didn’t want to ruin our day together.”

“It’s okay,” you tell her, because it is the only thing you can tell her. You hold Undyne there on the bed for a long time, listening to the cool rush of the river pounding mutely through the window, feeling her breathing get evener and evener, and eventually you’re right and it is okay.

**Author's Note:**

> One of the hazards of trying to fit everything into a single continuity when you're writing fanfiction is that people will often request stuff that you're not quite ready to handle yet, and if you try to tackle it, stories like this are the result. This story is just weird; it conflicts with some stuff established later in the continuity and in general it's just sort of forgotten. As for the story itself, I feel like it's a little weak due to it not really giving a good showcase of the emotions on display. I wish I'd kept going after the end and let Undyne cry and let her have a heart-to-heart with the reader about stuff, or, what would probably be a stronger choice, have her clam up, and show that she's very much fighting a war between this newly blossoming part of her that wants to be a typical girl and be cutesy and affectionate and emotional and the machine that she slips into whenever she's hurt, and to show that the reader isn't the magic answer to all of Undyne's problems. I think that would have been the stronger choice but by the end I was just tired of this fic so I let it end where it did. The actual writing is serviceable enough, though, and there are a few nice moments, so I'm not too put out by it.


End file.
